pleased that I didn’t catch a foot on it and plant my face in the floor. I sprinted along the aisle toward the narthex.
For an instant, I considered throwing hymnals at him, but as I had an ear for sacred music-especially Gregorian chants and gospel songs-and a respect for books, I restrained myself.
The front door, through which the golden retriever and I had come a few hours ago, had been locked for the night. Only a key would open it.
Two other doors led out of the narthex, but considering the church as I remembered it from outside, the exit to my left could have taken me only to the bell tower, which would have been a vertical dead end.
As I glanced back into the nave, Chief Hoss Shackett opened the gate in the chancel railing and limped out of the sanctuary, into the center aisle. He looked like Captain Ahab in a mad frenzy of white-whale obsession.
I took the only exit available to me, switched on lights, and discovered that I was in an enclosed flagstone walkway linking the church to an annex of some kind.
Taped to the walls were charming drawings executed by children of various ages, all featuring a smiling bearded man in white robes, who I assumed, because of his halo, must be Jesus. The Son of God, inadequately but earnestly rendered, was engaged in all manner of tasks that I did not recall being recounted in Scripture.
Jesus with hands upraised, transforming a rain of bombs into flowers. Jesus smiling but shaking his finger at a pregnant woman about to drink a bottle of beer. Jesus saving a stranded polar bear from an ice floe. Jesus turning a flamethrower on stacks of crates labeled CIGARETTES.
At the end of the walkway, beside a drawing of Jesus apparently using his miraculous powers to turn an obese boy’s prized collection of cakes and pies into packages of tofu, another door opened onto a corridor that served classrooms used for Sunday school and other activities.
When I came to an intersecting hall, I saw what seemed to be an exterior door at the farther end, and I made for it with all the haste of Jesus chasing from the temple those people who worked for companies that manufactured clothing made from polyester and other unnatural fabrics.
Although the exit was locked, it featured a thumb-turn for the deadbolt. Through the French window in the top of the door, the cold curdled fog was brightened by an exterior stoop light that had come on with the hallway fluorescents, and it appeared welcoming compared to the Hoss-stalked realm behind me. As I was about to disengage the lock, however, a coyote stood on its hind legs, put its forepaws on the door, and peered at me through one of the four panes of glass.
FORTY-FIVE
WHEN I LEANED CLOSE TO THE WINDOW IN THE door to see whether I would have to deal with a lone wolf, so to speak, or with a group, the coyote bared its stained and ragged teeth. The beast licked the glass as if I were a tasty treat displayed in a vending machine, for which it lacked sufficient coins to make a purchase.
Low to the ground, swarming in the fog, were radiant yellow eyes and, bearing the eyes, more coyotes than I had the time or the heart to count. A second individual stood up boldly at the door, and the multitudes behind these two leaders roiled among one another with increasing agitation, though they remained eerily silent.
Annamaria had told me earlier, on the greensward along Hecate’s Canyon, that the coyotes menacing us had not been only what they had appeared to be. She had admonished them that we were not theirs to take, that they must leave-and they had gone.
Although she had told me that I had nothing to fear from them, that I needed only to be bold, I did not feel capable of a boldness to equal that of these coyotes, which had the effrontery to threaten a man taking refuge in a Sunday school.
Besides, Annamaria understood something about them that I did not. Her knowledge made her bold. My lack of knowledge might get me killed.
Hastily retreating from the exit, I slipped into a classroom and closed the windowed door. Light entered from the hallway, and I stood to one side, in shadows.
I listened for Hoss Shackett but heard nothing.
Although usually coyotes explore only the portion of encroaching civilization that borders canyons and open wildland, occasionally one will venture far out of its territory and into the heart of a town. A Columbus of his species.
I had never before seen more than one or, at most, a pair this far from their natural habitat. The horde waiting in the fog seemed to be without precedent.
More peculiar than their distance from open hills and rough canyons was in fact the number of them. Although a family of six had threatened us earlier in the night, coyotes do not travel in traditional packs.
They hunt alone until they mate, whereafter they hunt in pairs. In the cycle of their lives, there will be a period when they hunt as families, the parents with their offspring, until the young decide to venture out on their own.
A female will bear three to twelve pups in a litter. Some will be stillborn, and some might die in their first days. A large family numbers eight or ten.
Although the fog could be deceiving and although my imagination is notorious, I was convinced that at least twenty of the beasts had swarmed beyond the door, and perhaps many more.
If they were not, as Annamaria had said, only what they seemed, then what
Whatever they might be, I supposed that Mama Shackett’s boy was deadlier than all the coyotes in the night from the Pacific to the Mississippi. I became increasingly unnerved by the stealth with which he sought me.
Hooding my flashlight, I explored my surroundings, hoping to find something that might serve as a weapon, although I recognized that a Sunday-school room would not offer the choices of an armory or, for that matter, of Birdie Hopkins’s purse. The chief most likely would not be so slow-moving that I could buffet him into submission with a pair of blackboard erasers.
In my explorations, I came upon another interior windowed door, this one with a vinyl blind drawn over the panes. I discovered that it opened into the next classroom, perhaps so that one instructor could easily monitor two classes.
I left the door standing open behind me, both to avoid making a noise and to leave a clear route for a swift retreat.
Each room featured a narrow supply closet in which I could have taken refuge. And each teacher’s desk offered a knee space big enough to conceal a man.
If Hoss Shackett conducted a thorough search, which I expected that he would, perhaps after calling in a deputy or two for backup, he would inevitably find me in any closet or knee space. The only question then would be whether the chief would beat me brutally with a nightstick and then shoot me to death-or shoot me to death and then beat me.
Because the second classroom connected to the third by way of an interior door, suggesting that all of these rooms were similarly joined, I might be able to circle through the annex to the entry corridor, getting behind Shackett and away.
Something creaked. I switched off the flashlight, and froze.
The sound had not come from nearby. I couldn’t discern whether it had arisen from the hallway or from one of the rooms through which I had recently passed.
